Canadian Journal for Traditional Music (1973)

"FOLKSONG PERFORMANCE IN FRENCH-NEWFOUNDLAND CULTURE: A
RE-EXAMINATION OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE DIMENSIONS OF EXPRESSION"

Gary R Butler

Abstract

I wish to acknowledge the useful comments offered by
Neil V. Rosenberg during the initial preparation of this paper several
years ago. I particularly acknowledge with respect the assistance of the
late Mme Josephine Costard of Cap-St-Georges, Newfoundland. Her talents
and her warmth are, and will continue to be, greatly missed.

The performance of folksongs is commonly regarded by specialists as
consisting of traditional texts sung in traditional contexts which are
characterized by the observance of behavioural norms and expectations by
participants involved in the communicative event. A folksong tradition
therefore consists of textual, contextual, and behavioural dimensions, all
of which must be identified and their respective parameters delineated if
the researcher is to succeed in the construction of an ethnography of
communication — "an ethnography of singing" so to speak — of the musical
tradition. Viewed in these terms, a folksong tradition is an inherently
prescriptive process of cultural retention and performance, encompassing
both active individual performers and their receptive coparticipants, and
determining the nature of their interaction.

As a result of this concentration upon the means by which the
determinant force of tradition directs individual behaviour in context, it
is easy to overlook the idiosynchratic manipulation of tradition by the
performer for the realization of more personal, non-collective goals.
Obviously, the emphasis of research initially falls on the description of
collective, shared norms, for only then may behaviour which deviates from
these norms be identified. However, care must be taken to ensure that an
overly prescriptive model is not constructed and proposed as the one,
authentic tradition. Indeed, it is the recognition of this caviate that
has permitted scholars investigating a variety of folkioristic genres to
identify public and private dimensions of performance, and to elaborate
the real social implications of such variation within a single
tradition.1

In this paper, I will extend the public-private continuum farther to
include the level of personal, idiosynchratic performance. Through an
examination of an individual folksong performer, the late Mme Josephine
Costard, a French-Newfoundlander of Cap-St-Georges, Port-au-Port
Peninsula, I will try to demonstrate how she manipulated the folksong
tradition of her culture to create and maintain an identity and social
status within that culture.

The history of research in French-Newfoundland culture is relatively
short, and despite extensive early collections of folksong corpora
elsewhere in the province, Newfoundland's native French folksong tradition
did not become the focus of serious inquiry until comparatively recent
years. As early as 1929, Greenleaf and Mansfield spent a substantial
amount of time on Newfoundland's West Coast. Greenleaf even reports
visiting the Port-au-Port Peninsula, where she admits her initial surprise
upon hearing folksongs "sung in literary French which I could
understand."2 However, no examples of this tradition appear in her
subsequent publication. The reason for this absence lies no doubt in
Greenleaf's limited ability to cope with the French-Acadian dialect
typical of the area; Greenleaf herself implies that she preferred to leave
the study of this tradition to "a collector with a knowledge of these
tongues."3 In the same year that Greenleaf and Mansfield embarked upon
their fieldwork, Maud Karpeles commenced a similar project, but her aim
was the collection of "folk songs of English origin,"4 and no mention is
made of the French tradition in her eventual publications.

For reasons such as these, and because of the extreme geographic and
linguistic isolation of the area's inhabitants, the French-Newfoundland
folksong tradition remained unexplored for some thirty years. Finally, in
1959, Kenneth Peacock visited the Port-au-Port Peninsula as part of his
broader survey of the folksongs of outport Newfoundland, and brought
serious attention to bear upon the singing tradition of this minority
group.5 One of Peacock's major informants was to be Josephine
Costard.6

Josephine (Josie) Costard was born in 1904 in La Grand' Terre, a tiny,
isolated fishing community located on the western coast of Newfoundland's
Port-au-Port Peninsula.7 Her father, Théophile Dubé, was a native of La
Rochelle, France; her mother, a first-generation Newfoundlander of Breton
parents, was born in La Grand' Terre. Josie remained in her home community
until the age of seventeen, when she married and moved to Cap-St-Georges.
Her husband, Raphael LaCosta (Costard is apparently an anglicization of
this Basque family name), was a widower some twenty-five years older than
his new wife. Josie thus inherited an already large family and eventually
bore eight children of her own.

Josie was exposed to the French song tradition from a very early age.
Both her maternal and paternal grandparents had been respected singers, as
was her father, whose talents are still spoken of with respect by older
inhabitants of the Peninsula. Indeed, Thophile Dubé was a singer of some
renown among the French settlers and his presence was frequently sought
and highly appreciated at local gatherings, or "veillées,"8 in the
community. It was as a child balanced with her sister, Mary-Jo, on her
father's knees that Josie first heard many French songs. Indeed, Josie
sang more songs learned from her father than from any other single source,
and the influence this man appears to have had on her repertoire warrants
some discussion of his life history.

Thophile Dubé's background, compared with those of most of the settlers
who arrived from France, makes him a somewhat exceptional character.
During his youth in France, Dubé earned his living as a singer. He later
entered into training for the priesthood and spent some fourteen years at
college and in religious instruction. According to Josie, her father spoke
several languages, including French, Breton, Spanish, Latin, and some
English. Yet, for some unknown reason, 'le Vieux Dubé' suddenly abandoned
his seminary training in France and came to Newfoundland's French Shore as
a simple fisherman. He settled at La Grand' Terre and soon became known
and respected for his singing ability, for his talents as a 'docteur,' and
for his literacy.

As mentioned above, Théophile Dubé was immensely popular as a singer at
the public "veillée" which was, during Josie's youth and until recently,
the principal form of traditional entertainment among Newfoundland's adult
French population. These "veilles," or "times," were essentially house
parties and took place most frequently during the long months of winter,
when occupational activities were limited. People from the community would
gather at one home or another to play cards, dance, tell tales, and sing.
Towards the end of the evening, a light lunch would be served by the
hosts.

Josie remembers clearly these "veillées." When she was a child, she was
permitted to be present when the gathering was held at her parents' home.
Later, when she was of an appropriate age, she attended these social
gatherings at the homes of others as well. Josie started singing at public
"veillées" when she was just fourteen and continued to perform in this
context until the demise of the tradition many years later.

The decline of the "veillée" did not have the same detrimental effect
upon Josie's singing as it did upon the repertoires of the traditional
storytellers, or "conteurs." Unlike these latter, many of whom gradually
forgot their tales as a result of the absence of contexts in which to
perform (but note Thomas, Les deux traditions), Josie continued to sing
her songs, albeit in a different setting. She now sang within what might
be considered a 'private' performance context. However, a close
examination of this context will demosntrate that this term may not be
altogether appropriate.

Josie was seventy-six years old when I last met and talked with her.
Understandably, therefore, she did not leave her home often and spent most
of the day dealing with her household chores, watching television, and
entertaining the occasional visitor. She would, however, spend much of her
time alone, singing to herself the old French songs which she had known
most of her life. What is more significant, her singing did not consist of
mere snatches of verse sung quietly to herself; rather, Josie's singing
was performed in a strong, even voice, and the songs were uninterrupted,
full-length versions.

While I was visiting one of Josie's grandsons in Cap-St-Georges in
1978, he and his wife remarked that Josie could often be heard singing to
herself, that this often lasted the entire day, and that the performance
was audible for a considerable distance from her house, certainly to any
passers-by. This was, in fact, the case during my visit. During the
summer, Josie would move her rocking chair outdoors onto her small porch,
where she would sing and rock to her heart's content.

This discussion of Josie's singing practices raises a number of points
which have an immediate bearing upon the question of whether Josie's
performance may be considered as occurring within a private or a public
context. If one dismisses for the moment the informant-collector context
as being artificial, one is left with what appears to be a private
performance situation. Josie's performance does not correspond to Ives'
definition9 of the public tradition, as there is no audience present and,
thus, there is no immediate audience-performer interaction generated. The
singing does not occur within the context of a social gathering designed
with the express purpose of mutual entertainment and to which all
participants contribute as performer, audience, or both equally. Most
often, Josie was alone when she sang.

Nor does Josie's singing correspond entirely to Ives' definition of
that which he considers the private, or "domestic," tradition of
performance. The performers whom Ives considers as operating within this
context sing only for their own self-entertainment and, at most, in the
presence of members of their immediate family. The private context of
their performance is a tradition which is, and has been in the past,
divorced from any connection with the public context. Josie, however, had
been a public performer in the "veillée" context. In addition, she had
occasionally performed, albeit infrequently, in what the Cohens have
termed the "assembly context"10 at a number of folk festivals in
Newfoundland. In contrast, Josie also participated in activities where a
number of women would gather informally to knit, chat, and sing to each
other, and she professes having learned a number of her songs during such
gatherings. While this context corresponds, in part, to Ives' definition
of the domestic in that it was work-oriented and exclusively female, it
also corresponds to some degree of Ives' all-male public performance
context.

These factors all have important implications for the categorization of
the performance context under consideration, and this categorization is of
importance in determining the social and personal significance of this
form of traditional behaviour to our performer and her community culture.
Our contention here is that, although the solitary setting in which Josie
would perform was indeed private and domestic, the context of the
performance was, in a very real sense, public in import. Josie would
indeed perform for the purpose of self-entertainment; but an unseen and
'absentee' audience would react to her performance. Josie was renowned for
her ability and talent as a traditional singer, and all members of her
community had, at one time or another, heard her singing alone in her home
or on her porch. Researchers interested in the folk-song tradition of the
Port-au-Port Peninsula French were invariable directed to Josie and
conversation dealing with this tradition invariably included some mention
and praise of Josie's singing. Thus, even though Josie's performance was
self-directed, it was, at the same time, other-directed, in result if not
in intent. This last point will be discussed later.

It might be argued that Josie's singing was more an idiosyncratic than
a traditional phenomenon. Viewed synchronically in terms of the
contemporary state of French-Newfoundland culture, this would appear to be
true. However, her singing was not founded upon the dictates of
contemporary group cultural norms, but rather represented the product of
Josie's personal adaptation to culture change in her society. Her singing
began in an earlier period and was molded by the requisites and
expectations engendered by an earlier stage of the culture. As the culture
evolved, so too did the context of Josie's performance, as she adapted to
new cultural and social conditions around her. For this reason, her
performance may be evaluated only through a diachronic analysis of the
factors involved. As Arensberg points out:

The social system of each group possesses three components:
the structure of interaction, termed a relational system, a system of
customary behaviour, and a system of values. Inevitably, all three
systems are interdependant and support and modify each other. The whole
exists in time and space and in a given environment. The environment is
in some measure modified by and reflects the system. Changes in either
affect the other."

The structure of interaction with which we are concerned is that which
obtains between performer and audience within the singing context; the
system of customary behaviour is that of the performer, as well as that of
the responding audience; and the system of values is that which results
from the enculturation of these participants and which determines why the
singer sang the songs she did, and why she elicited the favourable
response from the community. These may be fully understood only through an
examination of how they relate to modifications of the sociocultural
environment. In this instance, we are concerned with the manner in which
the relational and behavioural systems of the public "veillée" context
have been modified by a corresponding change in the sociocultural milieu
of the Newfoundland French. The value placed upon the singing and songs of
this former context, as interviews with Josie's contemporaries have shown,
has not diminished.

Some brief mention of those factors which contributed to the decline of
the "veillée" tradition is appropriate at this point. One such factor was
the change in the work patterns of the Newfoundland French of the
Peninsula. With the installation of the Harmon Air Force Base in
Stephenville during the early 1940s, the advent of winter no longer
entailed the necessary curtailment of work, as employment was available on
the base. The arrival of radio and, more importantly, of television to the
area provided alternate forms of entertainment. Eventually, if gradually,
the youth rejected the "veillée" tradition in favour of more 'modern'
forms of entertainment.

With the disappearance of the "veillée," the corresponding relational
and behavioural systems were, per force, modified. That the value system
influencing Josie's own choice of songs and singing style had not changed
is evident from an examination of her own evaluation of her repertoire.
She sang primarily French language songs and, whenever possible, preferred
to speak French rather than English, although she ws fairly proficient in
the latter. She particularly emphasized her enjoyment of "les vieilles
chansons françaises de France," thereby adding the stipulation that her
preferred songs were those which were French both in language and in
country of origin. She was also proud of the fact that the French in her
songs, so she had been told, was more easily understood than that of many
other performers in her community. Indeed, the texts of her songs are,
linguistically, remarkably conservative, and make use of lexical items and
grammatical forms which occur rarely, if at all, in French-Newfoundland
dialect. A final criterion of evaluation was that the songs be long (Josie
preferred "les vieilles chansons longues"), and line repetition was an
important feature ("Faut que ça soit répété a deux fois.").

These criteria are obviously those principles, or cultural norms and
expectations, of the French Newfoundland of Josie's youth and which she
learned through the enculturation process which prevailed within the
context of the "veillée." In his discussion of musical behaviour, Merriam
describes such a process as follows:

Conceptual behaviour, ideation, or cultural behaviour
involves the concepts about music which must be translated into physical
behaviour in order to produce sound. Here lies the entire process of
determination of the system of musts and shoulds of music, as well as
the system of normative and existential concepts. 12

This enculturation process explains how Josie learned the songs she
sang, as well as the reasons for the criteria that governed the evaluation
of appropriate song texts and style by both performer and audience. The
members of the enculturating group were, in large part, metropolitan
French who transplanted their standards for performance item, style, and
context into the Newfoundland environment. Josie's values were, in part,
their values.

The decline of the "veillée" restricted Josie's performance to the
all-female 'knitting bee' context, but with the television and the
tremendously popular 'soaps,' this occasion too disappeared.13 Ultimately,
Josie's singing became restricted primarily to the solitary context
described above. Doubtless, nostalgia, personal gratification, and pride
were among the reasons that Josie continued to sing. However, there was
another factor which was of equal, if not greater importance, this being
the status which Josie's singing reinforced for her in Cap-StGeorges, and
the role definition it furnished an otherwise socially inactive, aged
widow.

As mentioned above, Josie was renowned in Cap-St-Georges for her "old
French songs"; but she was also equally known for her talents in the other
French communities on the Peninsula, La Grand' Terre and L'Anse-à-Canards.
As would be expected, her contemporaries were most fond of their past
traditions and all knew and admired her. Nevertheless, the younger
generations of Cap-St-Georges were equally aware of Josie's singing
habits, although they accorded less respect to the French songs than did
their elders, considering them too old-fashioned. Consequently, they were
somewhat less appreciative of the significance of Josie's ability.

This variation of opinion across social groups is to be expected when
one examines affect and valuation intra-culturally. As Arensberg
notes:

Value systems may also be differentiated on the basis of the
type of relational system with which they are associated. The
evaluational responses which each individual makes to events occurring
within a system ... are manifestations of the values held by the
individual.14

The value system of the older members of the community was similar to
Josie's own, and reflected their shared enculturation with reference to
the "veillée" tradition. This shared value naturally elicited the
normative responses corresponding to that which Josie's customary musical
behaviour and the system of interaction dictated.

There were, therefore, in Josie's singing many elements which warrant
its classification as a type of public performance. There was the
performance of a socially sanctioned mode of expression which continued to
elicit the approval of an 'absentee' audience. That Josie's singing
provided her with some degree of high social status appears evident. That
her performance was private in setting while public in import explains the
bestowment and reinforcement of this status. What is more, Josie was aware
of this approval and of the status which this involved. The community did
respond to her singing, albeit indirectly, and this response was directed
back to her in various manners. Finally, Josie had been interviewed and
recorded a number of times by "people from the University" a fact the
import of which was lost on neither the performer nor the community.
15

It is the combination of these factors that suggests that Josie's
performance was other-directed not only in practice, but also in intent.
Certainly, the responses of outside interviewers and her own community
would have tended to encourage her to sing and to conserve its value in
the minds of both her and her community. That the younger residents of
Cap-St-Georges recognized Josie's talents, even if they did not respond to
them as did their parents and grandparents, suggests that commonly shared
enculturation and respect for Josie's past celebrity as a "veillée"
performer were not the only sources of Josie's status. In a very real
sense, Josie's status was the result of both historical and contemporary
determinants.

This study has concentrated in large part upon the concepts of public
and private performance contexts. We have employed this public-private
dichotomy as a referential point of departure, to focus attention upon the
role of the individual in traditional processes. The perspective adopted
and the hypothesis developed are not intended as a replacement for the
original performance model. Rather, the public-private model has been
extended to include our data and, consequently, to present a more accurate
representation of the relationship binding performer to tradition, and
individual behaviour to collective societal values.

A distinction must be made between those folklore activities and
processes which operate within a public setting and those which operate in
a private setting but which serve a public function, both on the level of
the individual and of the community. The public performance in a public
setting might be defined as that which involves intimate contact between
participants engaged in a culturally significant activity wherein a
temporally immediate performer-audience group dynamic develops and
reaffirms the values of the group. Such a context was that of the public
"veillée." The public performance in a private setting does not entail
this immediacy of participant contact or this temporal immediacy of
interaction. Nonetheless, contact, interaction, and reaffirmation of
cultural values are features of both examples of folksong performance. The
private performance does not necessarily involve these components.

In his portrait of a Newfoundland song-maker, John Szwed remarks that:
"... there is one area of folksong scholarship that is a blank: it remains
for us to discover what the songs mean to their singers and to their
listeners."16 Although this study does not deal with particular songs or
their texts, it does profess the same aim as that outlined by Szwed in
that it has attempted to determine the significance of a particular mode
of song behaviour to both the performer and the community of which she was
a part. The situation described represents the results of tendencies
towards cultural change and retention in the evolving society of the
Newfoundland French.

5. It should be noted that since Peacock's seminal research, a
considerable corpus of folk-song material of the Newfoundland French has
been collected and is currently housed in Memorial University of
Newfoundland's Centre d'Etudes Franco-terreneuviennes.

6. Some thirty of Josephine Costard's songs were subsequently published
in Kenneth Peacock, Songs of the Newfoundland Outports (Ottawa: National
Museum of Man,1965).

7. The information upon which this article is based was collected
during field research in Cap-St-Georges between 1978 and 1981. See MUNFLA
80-144, F3480c-F3482cc/C4818c-C4820c.

13. For a discussion of the impact of television soap operas on French
Newfoundland culture, see Gerald Thomas, "Other Worlds: Folktale and Soap
Opera in Newfoundland's French Tradition," in Kenneth S. Goldstein and
Neil V. Rosenberg, eds., Folklore Studies in Honour of Herbert Halpert
(St. John's: Memorial U of Newfoundland), 19.

14. Arensberg, 269.

15. It is probably no coincidence that Josie was chosen by the
French-Newfoundland community to perform for the Secretary of State of
Canada during his trip to Stephenville in 1974. My thanks to Gerald Thomas
for this information.

16. John Szwed, "Paul E. Hall: A Newfoundland Song-Maker and Community
of Song," in Henry Glassie, Edward D. Ives, and John Szwed, eds, Folksongs
and their Makers (Bowling Green: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1970),
149.